


Clues

by orphan_account



Category: escape the night - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-16 00:06:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16074218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Matthew Patrick is a detective in 1978, arguably one of the most talented in his field.But he’s never seen anything like this.





	Clues

**Author's Note:**

> goodness gracious this took a while to write

It’s hot.

The summer of 1978 will later be marked as one of the hottest in Los Angeles history, but for right now, all anyone cares about is finding some way to stay cool.

Matthew Patrick, however, is stuck behind his desk. He taps his pencil against the wood, listening to the creaky fan blow a negligible amount of air into his office.

He feels trapped.

The unfinished crossword from yesterday’s paper sits in front of him, the edges curled from the heat.

 _The greatest detective since Sherlock Holmes_ , a newspaper article proclaimed, after Matthew had broken up that drug ring a few years back, citing his code-breaking skills.

He stands up, feeling his button-down shirt cling to his back under his jacket. He needs something to do.

Pacing for the fourth time that morning, he stares up at the ceiling, textured tiles bulging with age and humidity.

His secretary walks in, holding a newspaper.

“Did you see this?” she asks, and the disbelief in her tone makes him look up.

EIGHT RESIDENTS REPORTED MISSING

The pictures on the front are in a grid, each blurry face smiling wide, the last known photo before they disappeared.

Matthew recognizes a few of them.

Teala Dunn had been a covert operations specialist for the Los Angeles branch, so he’s spoken to her before, if only in passing.

Safiya Nygaard has interviewed him so many times he’s lost track. They’ve become good friends, actually. He’s even gone on double dates, him and his wife with her and her boyfriend.

Colleen Ballinger is a celebrity in the disco scene, so it’s probably because of her that this made the front page. She’s been a pivotal witness in a few cases, but never one he’s been involved in.

A record producer, a hippie, a daredevil… what’s the common denominator here? All of these people are completely different.

Nikita Dragun’s criminal record is impressive. Matthew’s seen it before. He’s seen _her_ before, strutting into jail like she wasn’t even in handcuffs. She got out on bail the next day, nobody really knew how.

The last picture takes a moment to form into something familiar in his brain.

Rosanna Pansino. Rosanna?

Ro?

For the first time all day, Matthew’s body goes cold. He looks closer, takes the newspaper from his secretary, examines the picture.

It’s her.

What was she doing with all of these people?

She’s missing?

Sure, they hadn’t called each other in two weeks or so, but Matthew thought that was just because she was busy. She was always busy. Always traveling, always getting from one place to the next.

He reads the article below. There’s almost no information. The only thing they know is that everyone disappeared a week ago, off the face of the earth.

They didn’t tell anyone where they were going.

That’s the strangest part, Matthew thinks. These people-or at least the ones he knows-had lives. They had friends, family, even fans in some cases, who would care if they went missing.

He’s definitely curious.

A fellow detective pokes his head in. “Hey, Patrick.”

Matthew looks up. 

“We have some evidence. Wanna see?”

He’s surprised. Usually, detectives don’t collaborate. I’ll-stick-to-my-case-if-you-stick-to-yours type of mentality.

“Sure,” he responds, pushing back the chair and following the detective out into the hallway. It’s even hotter out here, windows jammed open with books and folders.

On the table, in sealed plastic bags, are a few possessions discovered at the residences of the missing people.

Most of it seems pretty unimportant, but there’s a bag with a letter in it that intrigues Matthew.

“Has anyone taken a look at this?” he asks, holding it up, and the detective shakes his head. 

“Nope. They mostly just glanced at it.”

“Why didn’t you do anything?”

“Not my area of expertise. I deal in murders, Patrick. Not this namby-pamby bullshit.” The man grins, and yellow teeth gleam wickedly in his mouth.

Any camaraderie Matthew had been feeling with this guy vanishes, but he keeps his mouth shut. He wants to be able to find a clue.

My friends,

I’m going on an extraordinary adventure. I’m in need of your help, and so are hundreds of others...

Matthew reads the whole letter. It talks about a curse that’s been started by a demon. There’s a town mentioned, but no name’s given.He rolls his eyes. The amount of supernatural nonsense going around is starting to annoy him.

He looks at the signature.

-Joey Graceffa

A spark of memory ignites in the back of his brain, and he inhales sharply. Decades ago, there had been a huge amount of media attention directed towards the disappearance of eleven people into the woods. He remembers being given this case as an example in training. 

But this was the unsolvable example, the one they gave recruits to tell them that some mysteries couldn’t be completed, that there were destined to be cases that would fade in importance over time and go cold.

Matthew scrambles to his feet and goes into the hallway, past the people bent over paperwork, down to the Records Room.

When he walks in, the door slips closed behind him.

He runs his fingers over the uneven portfolios as he walks through the storage shelves, and the smell of old paper and ink lingers in the back of his nose.

Tugging a sheet out, he opens the folder marked 1928 MANSION DISAPPEARANCES.

It’s the same kind of story. Eleven seemingly unrelated people went to Joey Graceffa’s elaborate house, which, according to the deed, he was supposed to inherit the night of the report.

A little research into the mansion showed that there had been several previous owners, each more eccentric than the last, all meeting terrible deaths.

That was the extent of the evidence.

There were no bodies. There were traces of blood belonging to the victims found in a few places, but nothing more incriminating than that.

Matthew wonders about the connections between this case and the one in the newspaper.

Unrelated people.

Disappearing to a place they didn’t tell anyone about.

It’s not much, but it’s more than anybody else has so far.

Matthew goes to put the file back, but when he does, a few yellowed slips of paper falls onto the ground.

He hasn’t seen these before.

_Witness Report: Grant Stevens_

_I was driving down Moors Avenue in the early morning, ‘round four, when the sun comes up, when two crazy-lookin’ folks stumbled out of the woods._

_What were they wearin’? Oh, Christ, some hoity-toity nonsense. The girl’s all decked out in this dress and hat and pearls like she’s off to the opera. The guy’s simpler, but still rich-people clothes, stiff shirt and gold suspender clasps._

_They was real agitated. I thought they was talking in tongues for a good few minutes._

_Kept sayin’ things about the old mansion up on the hill, and they had lost a third friend or somethin’, curses and spooks and shit- er, stuff. All sorts of unsavory business. I asked if they could use a lift anyhow, though, seeing’s they were in rough shape._

_The girl, she was talkin’ about some Joey character for the whole drive, real anxious-like._

_And the way she was speakin’, low and menacing, kinda gave me the creeps._

_So I was already sorta on edge, and then she’s mumblin’ about demons and watching her friends die._

_I started wonderin’ if I had picked up two murderers._

_And then her friend says somethin’ real creepy._

_“I don’t think it’s over. I think we’re just the beginning of this.”_

_I dropped ‘em off here. Didn’t really have any other place to take those two._

_All I can say is that they seemed mighty convinced._

_That’s it._

_Can I go now?_

Matthew feels the hairs on his neck rise as he reads the statement.

This wasn’t included in the unsolvable case file.

The descriptions matched Oli White and Eva Gutowski almost exactly with what they were recorded wearing last.

But it almost sounded like they’d been involved in some sort of supernatural encounter.

You could chalk that up to extreme stress, he supposed, but the absolute conviction seemed too genuine.

There’s something deeper going on here.

The next paper isn’t about Oli or Eva, though, it’s hospital records for a Miss Laura Spieler and a Mr. Ethan Clark.

The record’s descriptions, though, are obviously Eva and Oli. They must have changed their names to escape whatever tragedy happened at the mansion.

Matthew heads back to his desk, not hearing when people call out hellos to him.

If he hurries, and gets the information he needs, maybe he can save his friends.

***

Spieler… Spieler…

Matthew runs his finger down the address book, trying to find Eva.

Maybe she wouldn’t want to talk. He’d been in this business long enough that he knew scars lasted for several years.

But he had to try.

Laura Spieler, 145 Carlton.

Matthew clips his badge to his belt and pulls on his jacket.

It’s boiling outside. The asphalt seems to suck at his shoes, and the air is sweating.

Nobody’s out here. Everyone’s sitting inside, in front of their fans, slouched in their tepid bathtubs, leaning on the refrigerator, keeping cool.

His mind drifts to Ro. He hopes she’s okay. He hopes everyone’s okay.

Something about the curse Joey mentioned in the letter seems off. 

He stops in front of Shore Apartments. This is where Eva lives.

What if he’s wrong? What if this is just some random woman?

He suddenly feels like he’s just made a horrible mistake.

But he buzzes in anyway, and tells the landlady that he’s with the LAPD.

When Laura opens the door, she looks calmer than he expected. Or maybe that’s just a façade.

Her dark brown hair is streaked with gray, and there are wrinkles starting to set around her eyes.

“What are you here for?” she asks tersely.

Matthew rubs the back of his neck. “The 1928 Disappearances.”

Her eyes open wide, and she pulls him inside the apartment. “You have to be careful when you say things like that,” she hisses.

“So you are Eva,” Matthew says.

“Give the guy a medal. Yes, I’m Eva Gutowski.”

“Why the name change?”

“I didn’t want to be asked questions. I don’t like lying, and they wouldn’t have believed me if I told them the truth.” She starts pouring lemonade into glasses, adding chunks of ice, even though Matthew just walked in the door.

She obviously thinks they’re going to be here a while.

“What about-”

Eva holds up a hand to stop him. “I just said I don’t like questions.”

“I’ll believe you,” Matthew promises. “I swear. I have friends who just went missing, and I think the cases are related.”

Eva sighs. “Fine.”

She shifts in her seat, tucking her skirt under her legs.

“It started with a poisoning.”

She talks about mermaids and coffins and guns and magic, and how all of her friends died.

All of them. Dead. Joey and Oli escaped with her, but Oli died last year, and Joey has been off the grid forever.

The scary part of it is, her voice is dull while she tells this story. No emotion behind it at all.

The ice cubes in the lemonade start to melt.

“I never heard from Joey again. Until this.”

She opens a drawer, and pulls out the same letter Matthew saw earlier.

“I haven’t even talked to him in fifty years. Fifty YEARS!” she exclaims angrily.

“Everyone who’s missing has the same letter,” Matthew says. “That connects Joey Graceffa to both of these incidents.”

“He called me the day the letter arrived. The connection was terrible. All I heard was the word Everlock. Does that mean anything to you?”

Matthew’s still trying to process what he’s been told. If he believes Eva’s story, it means there’s a chance his friends are out there, alive.

It also means he’s batshit crazy.

If he decides she’s lying, then this proceeds like a normal investigation. Maybe it’ll have a normal ending, even, with the missing people found and the perpetrator put in jail.

But that daydream isn’t even substantial enough to last a minute. He knows that’s not the way this will all end.

“I haven’t heard of Everlock, no,” he answers.

Eva nods, as if confirming something to herself. “I think I’ve heard it somewhere, but I don’t remember where.”

“Do you think that it means anything?”

“I don’t know,” Eva mutters. “I don’t know anything.”

Matthew understands he should probably leave, and he stands up.

As he does, though, something occurs to him.

“Why didn’t you go to the police when you saw everyone’s picture in the paper today? You know more than everyone there put together.”

A flash of fear passes through Eva’s body, sudden and paralyzing. “I… I couldn’t…”

Matthew sees her trembling in front of him. Sympathy burns behind his eyes, and he doesn’t probe further.

“Thank you for the lemonade,” he says, hoping that she knows he’s thanking her for everything else as well.

She nods quickly. “If you find Joey…”

Matthew finishes her sentence. “I’ll let you know.”

On the walk home, he passes a lamppost layered in missing posters. That was fast, he thinks.

He also walks by Rosanna’s apartment. Usually, if she saw him out on a case, she’d wave to him from her balcony.

Now, the shades are closed, and the lights are off. The absence of his friend becomes real, tangible, something that aches in his chest.

He keeps moving.

He has to find them.

***

It’s nighttime, and Matthew can’t sleep.

He’s just waiting for Ollie to wake up.

The covers are crumpled at the foot of the bed, and Stephanie has fallen asleep with her head crushed against the pillow.

He can’t stop thinking about this case.

His mind goes over and over the details, and his eyes trace the flowery wallpaper in their bedroom, looking for something to latch onto in the dark.

Stephanie shifts next to him.

“What are you thinking about?” she whispers.

There’s a beat of silence before he responds. It’s dark, but Stephanie knows what he looks like right now: hair askew, eyes staring at the ceiling, chewing on his nails.

“Did you see the paper today?” he asks, pausing biting on his index finger’s nail.

“Yeah,” she replies, softly. “I saw Ro. And Safiya.”

“Do you think there’s any hope that they’re alive?”

His voice is fragile, like thin glass, like paper. Stephanie weighs her words carefully.

She doesn’t want to lie, but she doesn’t want to break him.

“I hope so,” she says tentatively, sitting up, trying to tamp down her sweaty hair.

It’s quiet.

A siren wails somewhere in the city, but it doesn’t wake Ollie up. It just punctuates the silence, letting it take up more space.

Stephanie leans against him, and they watch lights from the traffic shift and play on the walls, panels of yellow spinning through the shutters.

“I’m trying to solve it,” he says, more to the empty night than anyone else, since he thinks Stephanie’s probably asleep.

“I’m trying to put together clues that are disjointed and small and insignificant-looking, and there’s nothing there.”

He knows that for a first day, this was productive. He’s made considerable headway. There’s a case to made here.

But it doesn’t feel like it.

Ollie starts to cry again, and Matthew gets up with relief, happy to escape his own head.

When he gets back, Stephanie’s asleep, or at least pretending to be.

He gets a book out of a drawer.

Matthew had checked out a book on grief from the library yesterday, mostly on impulse. He wanted to figure out how to stop this feeling of always sinking slowly into the earth.

There’s time right now, so why not?

He starts the first page.

What was the last thing you said to them?

These are the words that echo in the heads of many experiencing the phenomenon of grief.

Was it something nice? Something supportive? Or was it dismissive? Did you laugh? Did you cry?

Whatever it was, you need to remember. Even if it’s painful, memories help us heal.

What was the last thing Matthew said to them?

Colleen, well, that was easy. He had said thank you after she’d given them a witness quote.

Nikita was probably something along the lines of “what are you in for this time” or something similar to that.

To Safiya, he’d said Sure.

She had just asked if he’d like to go for coffee with all four of them sometime next week.

Sure.

Ro… what about Ro?

He doesn’t remember, actually.

Probably something that would make her laugh. For some reason, he remembers her laughing.

A joke, maybe. Or a pun.

He’s smiling at this thought, and then for the first time, it hits him that they’re all most likely dead.

His throat burns with tears, and he’s swallowing his cries so he doesn’t wake Steph up, if she’s even asleep.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, barely a breath above the stillness of the night. “I miss you.”

But no one’s listening.

And last words to someone don’t count if there’s no one there to hear it.

***

The next morning, he gets into work early, when most of the doors are still locked and the sun’s just barely shining through the opaque glass windows.

He heads straight to the records room, draping his coat over the back of the chair. It was actually kind of chilly this morning, but it would probably be boiling again in a few hours.

Late last night, his boss had called him to tell him that he could officially take the case.

So, naturally, he was here two hours early, in the musty records room.

This time, he has several thick files on the rickety table, every one of them labeled Everlock. 

Apparently, this town’s got a history. 

He knows it’s a town, that much he was able to figure out just from asking a few people around the office.

Everyone thinks he’s a lunatic to take this case.

But they could be alive, trapped maybe. Or they’re just dead.

He just wants to know.

Matthew takes a deep breath and opens the file, almost dropping it when he sees what’s inside.

The first page has notations of a huge massacre that happened in the early 1800s, right after attempted settlement. The accounts are horrific, telling of entrails strung like streamers in the roads, blood soaking the dirt, but the worst part is the grainy photos, amplifying what happened into reality.

The murderer was never caught, but the town was abandoned for years, the thought of settling it gone.

The gold rush brought a new crop of people, looking to make a quick bit of money, but tragedy struck again when a fight broke out between the two leaders. The group divided.

Then it was used a stronghold for a mob for a while, until the boss, paranoid that somebody was ratting him out, shot everybody in sight.

And most recently, last year, a severe landslide cut off the road into town.

Firefighters tried to break through, but it was the strangest thing, they said. No matter how much they tried, they couldn’t get through. It was impossible. Dirt seemed to replace itself. Their guys were wandering off into the woods and not coming back.

So the town of Everlock was stuck as it was, effects from century-long tragedies still echoing around to this day.

Matthew closes the files and rubs his eyes. It had taken him about four hours to read through all the incidents.

“Hey! Patrick!”

He jumps, almost falling out of his seat. It’s a different detective from before. This one’s got cleaner teeth, which is a plus.

“There’s some information pertaining to your case.”

His case. 

Anxiety and a zip of unexpected excitement rushes through him at the thought. Maybe he can solve this.

“I’ll be right there.”

***

The information he was given was simply some coordinates.

Apparently, a person reported seeing a crowd of people who were all dressed brightly gathered in front of the landslide.

If nothing else, it was a lead to follow.

As he parks by the hill of mud and trees, he feels a chill pass through him.

He gets out, slamming the car door harder than he means to.

The remnants of a fire sit a few feet from the monumental pile of debris.

Somebody has been here recently.

A bag is also there, sitting off to the side, slumped over with uneven weight.

When Matthew opens it, there’s a crumpled sheet of paper.

Entering Everlock, it says, in the same haphazard scrawl that Joey wrote the letters in.

Below, there are steps for a séance.

“Was he in a cult or something?” Matthew asks aloud, halfway laughing.

All the ingredients are in the bag.

He feels a compulsion to start the séance, but he radioes in instead. He tells the unit that he’s found evidence, but there’s just static.

So he walks around.

After a bit, he sees a Polaroid picture on the ground, sticking up out of the dirt, very much out of place.

It’s of Safiya and Ro. Safiya’s smiling for the picture, but Ro’s looking over the photographer’s shoulder, laughing, eyes bright from the flash.

The clothes they’re wearing in the photo match up with the descriptions of what they were last seen in.

They were here.

He sees the bag again, and clicks on his walkie-talkie, trying one last time to reach the station.

But there’s nothing.

So he opens the bag, noting the strange symbol on the front.

Salt, crystals, and matches.

The instructions are fairly vague, but make enough sense that he’s able to glean the general meaning.

There’s no way this can work, he thinks. Ghosts aren’t real.

It’s his only option, though.

He works as the sun sets, and by the time he’s done, the sky is a million shades of blue and gold.

When he opens the creepy book, he sees the incantation.

“From across the veil of death, I request your presence, so I might make wrong things right. Enter into that so that I might see the doorway to Everlock.”

Nothing happens, and Matthew shakes his head. He knew it. He knew this was a dumb idea.

It was stupid to think he could bring them back.

He cries a little, he can’t help it, but then a surge of wind that he feels in his bones sweeps through the area, startling him out of his misery and extinguishing the fire.

A wispy green spirit flies into existence, and then before Matthew can react, it enters into his ear and bursts out of his mouth.

It doesn’t hurt, not really. 

But when he opens his eyes, thr ground rumbles below him.

Greenish-purple smoke, thick and churning, pours out of the ground, and Matthew stumbles backwards, covering his nose with his shirt, face still wet with tears. 

His brain races, trying to find a reasonable explanation for all the insane shit that’s happening, when the doorway appears in the middle of the landslide, curtains hung under a gilded awning.

Matthew goes through it, because that’s the only thing he can do.

He pushes the red velvet fabric aside, and there’s the town.

Everlock is in front of him.

Burned-out streetlights line the roads. Streamers are hung up between them, and a darkened tent sits in an open field farther away.

There’s no sign of any of his friends.

“Hello?” Matthew calls out, tentatively, into the night.

No one responds.

Honestly, he’d been expecting there to be a monster. He doesn’t know why, but something about this town feels like it doesn’t adhere to the rules of nature.

A low wind blows through, kicking up dust and newspapers and ashes.

A photo blows by, and Matthew grabs it out of the air, recognizing the flash of bright clothing.

Its edges are torn, as if the person who was holding this crumpled it, either on accident or purposefully.

But it’s of the group. They’re all grinning at the camera.

Behind them, though, Matthew can see a clown smiling cruelly, face contorted into one of psychotic glee.

He shudders. Clowns give him the creeps. There were a string of child murders a few years ago, involving a clown and a few haphazard automatons. Matthew had pretended to be unbothered by it, but in actuality it had unnerved him in a way that not many things did these days.

He puts the photo in an evidence bag. The shock is starting to wear off. This is just another case.

All he needs to do is find them, and then he can bring them home to their families and friends.

Matthew lets himself imagine it. This is the best part of being a detective- reuniting people.

It's like something broken be put back together again.

His foot crushes against something on the ground as he's lost in his reverie.

It's a Walkman.

Strangely, there's still a song playing, even though the batteries should be long dead.

It's Space Oddity, by David Bowie.

The unearthly quality of the lonely guitar fits perfect here, echoing among the sky filled with stars and fog. 

It repeats over and over again, causing something paranoid and fearful to settle in the back of Matthew's brain.

He keeps walking, and passes the one tent that actually has lights on.

Poking his head in, he sees crates strewn on the floor, a big-top style ring...

And two dead bodies.

The hippie and the record producer.

Manny and JC.

It smells rancid, like only decaying flesh can.

A slight, rotten sweetness of mold underlays the stink.

He doesn't want to look at them, so he takes pictures without watching.

In training, he was always the squeamish one.

The one nobody thought would ever make it, because he hated the smell of death.

Other people seemed to love it, though, hunting it like they were feral dogs, nostrils and pupils flared in tandem.

He runs out of the tent.

There have to be others, right?

More of them have to be dead.

Roi and Teala are laying in a field. Teala's face is slightly melted, blistered with burning toxins. Roi's just dead on the ground, eyes half-closed, mouth hanging permanently open.

Matthew doesn't want to keep doing this. He can't keep finding corpses. He needs to see someone alive.

Please, please, let someone be alive.

Colleen's body is mutilated beyond recognition, bits and pieces hanging off of spikes. The only thing that lets Matthew know it's her is the signature coat, the one that appeared in her magazines, on Broadway, in clubs across the country.

He wonders how the fans will react.

Then there's the Divine Lounge, which Matthew finds by following the large bootprints in the carpet.

Safiya.

The deaths have started to become pretty routine, but this one hits him in the windpipe, blocking off air, making it so that he can't get enough breath into his lungs to scream.

He saw her, just last week.

She was doing research for an article on the steep increase in crime that Los Angeles was facing, and what had started as an interview just became a nice chat.

They'd talked about mundane things, nothing you'd expect from the last conversation you would ever get to have with someone.

What would you expect?

Talking about how much they meant to you, probably. Trying to express how much you'd miss them. Something introspective and real and groundbreaking, not if Happy Days was going to air tonight or not.

He takes two pictures, and then he leaves, trying not to think about the gaping hole in her side.

The road leads to a church with a cemetery, and a twisted tree growing out of the ground.

There’s a small body on a slab of stone, and Matthew stops where he stands because he knows who it is.

Yellow beret.

Green jacket.

Brown hair.

He runs without being aware he’s running, legs carrying him without being commanded to.

He’s too late.

His best friend doesn’t have a right eye anymore.

There’s a knife in it.

He feels his knees buckle, feels himself fall, feels his head catch on the edge of the marble.

Pain skyrockets through his brain, and everything is bright and searing, but then it’s dark.

It’s dark, and it’s cold, but anything is better than seeing the hole where her eye used to be.

***

When he gets up, blood flaking from his forehead, he can look at the body.

Her left eye stares blankly up at the vaulted ceiling of stars, seeing and unseeing at the same time.

There are three daggers. One is lodged in her chest, one in her stomach, and one in her eye socket.

The rest of her body is fairly intact.

The pink nail polish on her fingers is chipped at the edges, probably from struggling against her fate.

“Wake up,” Matthew whispers, strangled with tears and fear. It’s a cliché and it’s stupid, he knows, he knows, he knows, but he needs her to wake up.

He needs her to yawn and blink awake, sit up, her eyes twinkling even in the dark, giggling about something.

Her hand’s long cold, but he squeezes it anyway.

Cakes. That’s what they were talking about.

She was going to make a cake for her sister’s birthday.

Her eyes lit up, her smile got really wide, and her hands waved around as an extension of her thoughts.

He’d made a sloppy offhand joke (“piece of cake”) but Rosanna had giggled for a full minute.

They’d talked for a while about Steph, and Ollie, and then he had to go. He had forgotten why.

“All right, goodbye!”

That was the last thing he had said to Ro.

Goodbye.

How very accurate.

For just a second, the memory was enough to keep her alive.

For just a second, she grinned at him, daggers gone, just Ro, smiling like everything was going to be fine.

For just a second.

But the thing about seconds is that they’re short.

And it’s over too quickly.

Matthew takes his picture.

He sits on the ground, crying harder this time, tears slipping from behind his glasses.

Ro and Safiya are dead.

There’s nothing he can do to bring them back.

***

Later, he’ll find Joey and Nikita. They’ll be pretty shaken up, and not very talkative, but they’re alive.

Matthew will take them back to the station, where he’ll present the pictures and other evidence.

Joey and Nikita won’t tell the police the whole story, but they’ll tell them most of it. They do give Matthew all the details, though. They know how hard it is to move on without a clear explanation.

The rest of the group will be confirmed dead.

Seven funerals will take place over the course of a few weeks. Matthew will go to all of them. He’ll comfort the families the best he can.

He will sit with his wife and his son afterwards, and try to forget what he saw that night.

Eventually, he’ll start to heal.

But right now, Matthew doesn’t know any of that. He’s sitting alone in a haunted cemetery, and all of his friends are dead, and he doesn’t know where to go from here.

He’ll never forget this feeling as long as he lives, this feeling of your soul being slowly destroyed.

He watches the sun come up over the edge of the hills, and he stands up, unsteady on his feet.

He’s going to keep moving.

“Goodbye,” he whispers, more for himself than for Ro.

He knows she can’t hear him. 

But until the day he dies, he’ll swear on his life that she responded.

“Bye, Matthew.”


End file.
